From the National Film Board of Canada and the Cannes Short Film Corner’s annual online contest comes this beautiful little film.  He can fix it!

Maybe you’ve already seen this.  Maybe not.  Either way, you need to watch this music video of Oren Lavie’s Her Morning Elegance . . . ex-cellent live-action stop-motion!

“But Mr. Andrea Bocelli, does Elmo have to?”

Also, yesterday (or does it count as today?  2 AM is an ambiguous time to classify), after seven hundred and twenty-six digital deaths over the course of the summer, on the 727th descent into the caverns, I completed Spelunky!

What’s that, you ask?  A devilishly difficult cavern-exploration/gold-collecting/troglodyte-killing/trying-to-stay-alive game, that is in a way a homage to both Indiana Jones and NetHack (which, incidentally, homages Indy itself).  With randomly generated levels, bullwhips, well-armed shopkeepers, golden heads that defy abduction, and permanent death, Spelunky‘s a blast — but hard!

I think I can truthfully (and mostly unashamedly) say that this is my second-greatest accomplishment of 2009.

(Oh, and I see Spelunky also apparently is modeled on a game called La-Mulana, which in turn is a tribute to the games that ran on MSX computers in the Greatest Decade.  Hmm, I’ll have to look into this . . .)

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

— Albert Einstein

Art by the amazing Matt Dixon.

. . . Forty years ago today.

Fun Fact: Man first stepped foot on the moon just 66 years after the first powered flight.  At that rate, we should be on Jupiter by now!

The work of Angel Garcia Pinto, a Spanish military artist. Paintings capable of making encyclopedia editors and little boys like myself tremble with delight!